1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of networked services.
2. Background
Internet service providers (for example, content distributors, such as web sites and radio stations, and Internet retailers) often want to prove to a third party that they have a large number of users, viewers or listeners (the audience or participants). Such information has historically been used to set advertising rates, so content distributors (in particular) have had an incentive to inflate these numbers. Various schemes for preventing content distributors from reporting artificially inflated audience sizes have been proposed (see for example: Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, Secure and efficient metering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1403:576-589, 1998; Matthew K. Franklin and Dahlia Malkhi, Auditable metering with lightweight security, Financial Cryptography, pages 151-160, 1997; and B. Masuci and D. R. Stinson, Efficient metering schemes with pricing, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 47:2835-2844, 2001; U.S. Pat. No. 6,055,508 to Naor et al., Method for secure accounting and auditing on a communications network; U.S. Pat. No. 6,389,538 to Gruse et al, System for tracking end-user electronic content usage; U.S. Pat. No. 6,418,467 to Schweitzer et al, Network accounting and billing system and method). With the advent of per-listener/viewer royalty fees for Internet radio and the growth of web content plagiarism, some service providers (such as the distributors listed above but also Internet merchants) now have an incentive to cheat by reporting artificially small audience/participant sizes and so to reduce the payments required to the content owner. None of the prior schemes for audience measurement detect such behavior.
Participant measurement protocols that are secure against deflation are necessary in many situations. These include, but are not limited to, Internet Radio/Video, Internet Software Distribution, and screen-scraping.
Internet Radio: The Internet has given rise to hobbyist Internet radio broadcasters which have (for example, stations have an average of less than one listener tuned in for 3 hours each day). These stations carry no advertisements and hence cannot afford to pay even the most modest of music royalties. Although some content owners may be willing to allow operation of such shoe-string operations, they are not willing to do so without some means of detecting when the station audience becomes significant.
Software Distribution: Often software owners arrange with content service providers to provide distribution services. The software owners cannot easily verify the number of times the software is provided by the distributor (thus requiring manual audits or just “trusting” the distributor). The software owner needs some inexpensive, low-overhead solution to determining the number of times their software has been provided.
Screen-Scraping: Websites that provide a useful service, such as Yahoo's real-time stock prices, often get “screen-scraped” by other web services. The scraping service simply fetches the information from the original service, parses the desired data out of the returned web page, repackages it in a new format, and finally presents it to the client. The owner of the useful service needs to know how often their useful service is provided by the other web service.
In each of these cases (and many more) a service provider provides a service for which the service provider is obligated to pay a fee to the owner of the service (whether that service be content, access to resource, or access to functionality). It would be advantageous to allow the service owner to be able to anonymously and independently monitor the number of participants to whom the service provider provided the service.